Lilith in Real Life
I’m taking a pause after writing a natal true Black Moon Lilith report while the Sun was in Taurus. I have a sense of needing to bring my energy back in and recharge. The present Mercury retro is pretty convenient timing, isn’t it?
Here’s me debriefing myself: I learned a tremendous amount about Lilith while writing the report, with useful words coming through about what I know in my bones about Lilith. I also connected on a new level with my own experience of the archetype (it’s in everyone, not just women). For a few years I’ve been working with my clients’ Liliths, helping them see in what arena of life they’ve invited suppression for bringing out their instinctual selves, and what they can do now to release whatever they’ve taken on about others’ fear of witnessing the wildness in them.
A major part of this is in affirming for people that this part of themselves is not a bad thing to feel shameful for having. We’re told Lilith is a demon, and the word needs to get around that demonizing the wild in us is a measure of control devised by people afraid that individuals will flail around violently and injure others, and destroy groups. Yet it’s our instinct, and we need it to be healthy.
The truth is that the wild in us can be integrated into our daily lives. Sometimes it does involve flailing (but this can be enabled consciously), and it acts violently only as a result of suppression. I’m assiting people to figure out how to integrate this energy proactively, with consciousness, into their lives.
My true Black Moon is in Sagittarius in the 2nd, conjunct Neptune-Mercury-Moon in Sagittarius/2nd-3rd. An astrologer a few years ago used a phrase for this that’s stuck with me: the satellite dish. It seems I can gather intuitive information of any sort if I just choose and figure out where to aim the dish, and that’s a fun and exciting part of the work that I do. And yet with Lilith there, I’ve internalized others’ fears that I might say inappropriate things, so I’ve mostly had a big tarp draped over this amazing tool.
A few years ago I realized that a key dynamic in my family growing up was that there were two people who were terrified someone would say something important-seeming and disturb the status quo, and there were two people who couldn’t stop saying things they felt were important, precisely to disturb the status quo.
I was in the second group, and when young, it seemed to my child logic that love and acceptance from my sister and father might depend on keeping my mouth shut.
So, can you guess what I did?
Yup, threw a tarp over the dish that seems designed to bring info to shake up the status quo.
And now, here I am, being asked what astrology conferences I speak at and where are my books, and I’m learning how and why to take the tarp off this admittedly amazing piece of equipment I’m blessed to be sporting.
Everyone has a Lilith story. Understanding what your Lilith has to say, and how to bring that out with consciousness, is an integral part of wholeness, of health. You have an instinctive voice waiting to come out that offers you a chance to usher yourself into a more vibrant aliveness. Lilith represents our primal selves, which are our means of connecting with life on a more meaningful, less merely-brainy ways.
Tom is available for private consultations. See his website for more info, to book a consultation, or to order a new true Black Moon Lilith natal report, outlining your Lilith by natal house, sign and aspect and upcoming transits and progressions.
May 27, 2008 By Tom Jacobs
A Lilith Profile
Recently, I met an astrologer with Neptune in Scorpio precisely on the Midheaven (Aug. 24, 1968, 6:22 PM, Redding, CA). I asked her if she’s an antenna for Neptunian power plays, and we talked about her 8th house South Node and what the 2nd house North Node is asking her to do.
All of us are conditioned in early life, and therefore much of what we have to heal & release typically involves what we learned from our families, whether spoken outwardly in the environments of our youth or not. She told me about the dynamics in her home growing up, mostly in terms of the differing levels of support for each of the children in the family, the attitudes their parents had about each of them that carry through to the present. And it sounded a little like something beyond an 8th house Libra South Node might be at work, though there were plenty of 8th house-related power plays and dark Libran issues of relationship imbalances and buried resentment.
Something in the story told me she’d been singled out in her family system for some reason that no one understood or had any idea how to talk about, so I looked up her true Black Moon Lilith (BML), which is opposite that Neptune, precisely on the Taurus IC.
Adding Lilith to the discussion helped contextualize her experience. Lilith in a person’s chart tells us many things, but the first is what part of the person is judged by others to be dangerous, and is therefore (according to others) in need of editing or suppressing. Lilith is a wild, instinctive influence in us and doesn’t want to be corralled, edited or reshaped. Yet we might give in to this pressure because, especially when we’re young, our survival might be threatened if we were to be thrown out of the group.
Not every situation is really that dramatic, of course, but many of us are carrying emotional memories from past lives in which we didn’t survive precisely because we didn’t yield to the mandates of the groups of which we were members. And when we’re young and our families are most of our world, it can certainly seem that survival is at stake.
Her true BML is in Taurus on the IC, the beginning of the 4th house, the house of family, heritage, roots and a person’s most private self. My acquaintance seems viewed by her family as Lilith, dangerous and in need of editing or suppressing. Her natural sense of establishing a value-based approach to life (Taurus) seems dangerous to them, and gets her into trouble with them. If she’s honest with herself about where she’s rooted (4th house), and what’s truly going on inside (4th house again), she’ll find Lilith there. And even if she doesn’t, others will still see the energy in her.
With Lilith on the IC or in the 4th house, it’s also true that our family of origin (or those who raised us, whether blood relatives or not) carries Lilith’s story. Her family has, likely for many generations, experienced at least some aspects of Lilith’s story. The censure from the greater society that any family would receive for representing Lilith will be distilled into rules and directives centered on how not to draw negative attention or punishment for being in some way wild and outside the reach of a community’s or society’s censuring arm, and will then be passed down through the generations framed as information necessary for survival.
The underlying energy of such inheritance can feel/seem like this: People, we can’t afford to have anyone around here acting out of bounds. Get in line, stop complaining and get with the group program. There’s a reason for everything, and just trust that it’s for your own good.
And then you have my acquaintance, who appears as Lilith to them, threatening to start leaking uncomfortable truths that seem to threaten the stability of the family system (Taurus/4th) at any moment. Even if she never spoke truths that made them uncomfortable, she would, to them, always seem on the verge of potentially doing so. And so they do everything they can to make her feel like she shouldn’t express herself - of course they do! They’re afraid of the potential repercussions, the kind they carry emotional memories of from the karmic past (past lives).
She’s got a karmic role in her family system as someone volunteering to speak uncomfortable truths, and exploring how to develop and stick with her own value system in a filial climate that doesn’t want what she’s bringing, that’s afraid of it. A big challenge for her is to honor her own needs while not cutting herself off from her family.
Much of her healing related to Lilith involves accepting that the ways that they have treated her are reflections not of her actual value or worth as a person (Taurus/4th house), but of their fear of having the status quo of the family disturbed by uncomfortable truths (also Taurus/4th house). As she lives the story of Lilith, she can change the entire dynamic by honoring who she deeply knows she is above all the feedback from others that might be hurtful.
And in case you didn’t see this coming, this echoes and underscores the symbolism of her Aries 2nd house North Node, where she’s asking herself to learn to bravely assert and directly live (Aries) a life based in her own value system (2nd house), which will result for her in a new level of self-esteem (2nd house), putting her love for herself before the judgments/esteem of others (Libra/8th house South Node).
Tom is available for private evolutionary astrology & intuitive counseling sessions. See his website for more information, and to pre-order on his new True Black Moon Lilith natal report, available in late May.
May 19, 2008 By Tom Jacobs
Notes on the Black Moon Lilith and Saturn
The following is excerpted from the new natal report I’m writing on Lilith. Specifically, it belongs in the Lilith-Saturn natal aspects section, but since we’re all subject to Saturnian realities via the way we organize into a collective - how we figure out how to live together in society - it seems appropriate for everyone.
With a Lilith-Saturn aspect, maturity and structure in Lilith expression is called for. In a sense, this has to do with learning to choose one’s battles while also picking or creating the right kind of turf on which to have them. The urge to explode and the resulting violence of giving in to Lilith’s anger does not have to happen - havoc is not necessary. With this aspect, you’ve signed up to figure out how to learn how to grow in your Lilith expression by introducing structure and form to it, thereby enabling the development of maturity. Along the way, healing of all wounds related to having been judged and punished for carrying Lilith’s energy, or being her outwardly, is required. For anyone with difficult and painful histories of interacting with Saturnian energy, the healing includes becoming a Saturnian figure. These people need to develop their own versions of Saturnian expression, versions rooted in personal relevance. And with a Lilith-Saturn aspect, relevance means incorporating Lilith into the structures of one’s life in positive, pro-active, creative ways.
Anyone looking to consciously reconnect with the primal, wild energy inside that is Lilith, which fuels our creativity and sense of connectedness to all of life and the earth, faces this challenge. The biggest hindrance to incorporating the primal wisdom of Lilith we each carry is the fear of negative sanction/punishment from Saturnian figures and institutions.
Healing these fears is paramount if we want to live in the present and create total health. Anyone who chooses to look at the wild inside in a new light, and see how to integrate it into their outer lives, moves into a more-human stance than we’re used to being or seeing. It’s a place of radical honesty, healing, empowerment and aligning with our individual portion of natural wisdom.
Tom is available for private consultations. See his website for more information and to order his new Black Moon Lilith natal report, available when the Sun enters Gemini. Pre-orders with $5 off are available until the Sun leaves Taurus (May 20th, 2008), making the cost $22 instead of $27.
May 9, 2008 By Tom Jacobs
Pluto in Capricorn & Gender Identity
A few weeks ago, I wrote in a post here that Pluto’s entrance into Capricorn can call up questions about what men and women are supposed to be and do.
I listened today, rapt, to an NPR radio story on a family dealing with the assertions of their child that he is not inhabiting the right sort of body.
That this radio series focuses on children is an imporant point: Our Capricornian nurturing styles, which are certain about how to classify and treat boys and girls, can be challenged to adjust to information coming from deep under the surface that doesn’t fit with our surface version of how things should be. In this case, the emotional realities of the children themselves represent the deepest sort of Plutonian self-knowing and the parents are confronted with the challenge of change.
Capricorn seeks to make symbols of individuals, at times leading people to try to embody the lowest common denominator of the collective consciousness in order to fit in or succeed. What happens when some individuals just can’t seem to fit into our predefined categories can vary, but these parents have chosen to adjust, seeing that their child’s true nature is not subject to redefinition by conventional standards based in a consensus mechanistic reality.
Not all parents who hear such paradigm-busting things from their children are so receptive and respectful of the needs of their children, of course. But perhaps Pluto’s transit through Capricorn can inspire more to rethink and refeel their stances in general, and accept the difficulty as a challenge to grow into the present, changing reality right in front of them.
May 8, 2008 By Tom Jacobs
Emotional Healing with Astrology
To have the kind of life we want in the present, we must heal our memories of and attachments to the past.
Astrology offers a vocabulary for and means to heal whatever we’re carrying from the past into our lives in the present day.
Evolutionary astrology is based in the fact that people change, over the course of a life and over the courses of many lives. One of its aims is to help people heal and release the past and gain awareness of the present, so they can choose to develop the kinds of lives they’d rather be living.
No one wants to relive the pain of the past, yet we don’t often have the awareness to heal it and put it in its proper place and move in the present. We end up, then, reliving what’s comfortable, which is often painful, and wondering how to move out of these destructive patterns that keep us from enjoying life and being happy about what we’re doing here.
Some key players in the emotional healing process:
- The South Node of the Moon, the ruler of that node by sign (Venus for Taurus, Jupiter for Sagittarius, etc.) and Pluto (all three players by house, sign and aspect) offer the vocabulary for any person’s emotional imprinting from past lives. These configurations speak to our past-life conditioning and wounding. Identifying and integrating the lessons we’ve set ourselves up to learn, as told by these symbols, is a key to beginning to live in the present moment and move into the arenas of our unique syllabus of soul growth.
- The asteroid Lucifer (1930) tells us about a person’s relationship with the notion of a higher power. What’s a person’s relationship with what could be called his or her inner goodness barometer? Another side of it: Has the person learned how to develop a healthy, distinct sense of ego while serving something greater than the self?
- The true Black Moon Lilith (BML) represents the instinctive, primal & wild part of us we’ve experienced shame and punishment from others for expressing. As the empty focus of the Moon’s orbit around the earth, the true BML is a part of our emotional makeup. As a point that’s never visible from the Earth, however, it often seems an elusive part of us, usually seeming best left in the shadows of our psyches. Locating and reintegrating our hard-wired portion of Lilith energy means finding creative and constructive means to express our wildness, based on house, sign and aspect.
Tom is available for private consultations. See his website for more information and to order his new Black Moon Lilith natal report, available when the Sun enters Gemini. Pre-orders at a discount are available until the Sun leaves Taurus (May 20th, 2008).
By Tom Jacobs